In March 1898, a 23-year-old Winston Churchill published his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. In it, he advanced the best advice yet given on how an outside imperial power should deal with a country like Afghanistan. Read Here – RealClearWorld
After being unceremoniously dumped in 2010, after one failed and one aborted leadership challenge, and after three years suffering the slings and arrows of outraged caucus colleagues, Kevin Rudd has his revenge. Read Here – The Diplomat
Japan‘s prime minister speaks openly about the mistakes he made in his first term, Abenomics, Japan’s wartime record (and his own controversial statements on that history), and the bitter Senkaku/Diaoyu Island dispute with China. Read Here – Foreign Affairs
As the great research ship Chikyu left Shimizu in January to mine the explosive ice beneath the Philippine Sea, chances are good that not one of the scientists aboard realized they might be closing the door on Winston Churchill’s world. Their lack of knowledge is unsurprising; beyond the ranks of petroleum-industry historians, Churchill’s outsize role in the history […]
Australia may be set for a record 22ndstraight year of economic expansion, but it will not save the federal budget or Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s job. That was the message from the latest economic data along with an election in Western Australia state, where voters handed Gillard’s Labor Party another drubbing. Read Here – The […]
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard is going American in a big way by setting the next national election seven months from now. The record length of the campaign is bad news for her opponent, Tony Abbott, and may be even worse for the nation’s 23 million people. Turning to a permanent campaign like that of the U.S. is […]
FOR 35 years the steel bolts holding up the ceiling of Sasago Tunnel, on a busy toll road west of Tokyo, were never checked. On December 2nd more than 600 of them had worked themselves so loose that a 130-metre stretch of the roof collapsed, crushing nine motorists. The disaster played into the hands of […]
NARENDRA MODI, the burly chief minister of Gujarat, is on a roll. On December 20th he won a third successive state election. Though the tally for his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) fell slightly, from 117 seats in 2007 to 115, his victory was emphatic, a triumph more for Mr Modi than for his party. Nobody […]
The great paradox of British politics is that the left moan about inequality, but it’s the right who will remedy it. Ed Miliband is proposing the restoration of the old order, where the poor get the worst schools and the rich get the best (and the opportunities that flow from it). Labour plans to tax […]
ONCE again, the Japanese public must be wondering whether politics only serves to inflict cruel jokes upon them. On September 26th the opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) chose Shinzo Abe, a nationalist former prime minister, to lead it into the next general election, even though he quit as leader after just a year in 2007 […]
looking beyond borders 